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You'll have to pardon me for making this post a little technical, but I think the big words are useful in this post. I'll try to define them, for my purposes, as I write.
One of the theological struggles of the Reformed theology is to properly maintain the visibility and relationship of both particularism and universalism. In the context of the doctrine of salvation, we may speak of "election," or predestination to salvation, which is God's choice of those sinners upon whom he will have mercy. This is a kind of particularism. Yet many Scripture passages show God making a universal offer of salvation to all the sinners who hear the gospel preached. This is a kind of universalism -- not meaning that all get saved willy nilly, but meaning that all are in principle offered the free grace of the Gospel.
The problem here is to ask how the particularism of election and the universalism of the gospel offer are to be reconciled with one another. What is the balance? How to we keep one aspect of the truth from being emphasized in some manner which is wrongly at the expense of the other?
It's pretty simple to envision the consequences of imbalance toward predestination. When the divine predestination dominates, then the question that will be asked implicitly is whether the people I propose to witness to are elect. I think this is "subliminal." The consequence will likely be the downplaying of evangelistic efforts. God is in charge. Let him bring them. If they show an interest, we'll try to take them in. Why spend your effort on so many who are likely non-elect?
Now it sounds like I'm mocking, but I'm serious. I think I'm describing a position that is implicitly held in the heart, though never expressed verbally, nor consciously acknowledged. What else can happen if you think God really doesn't express love to all who hear the gospel offer, or that his gospel call to everyone who hears is not a bona fide offer? You really cannot say to anyone that "God loves you and offers a wonderful plan for your life," if you wonder if it's true! You don't dare say to someone what you're actually thinking: "Christ's death may or may not be for you, but if you believe that it is for you, then you will be saved by it!"
This way of thinking is all wrong.
No matter how true predestination is -- and it is very true -- it is still the case that a bona fide offer of the gospel is made by God to all sinners who hear the gospel preached. If God is going around having the gospel preached all over the place and making bona fide offers of salvation to all who hear, who could ever think that love for sinners, and recognition of their real need for the gospel, should somehow be stifled by the doctrine of predestination?
To think so is contrary to every decent Reformed doctrinal statement ever written on the subject. The Westminster Confession says, referring to Adam's breaking of the Law of God:
WCF 7:3 Man, by his fall, having made himself uncapable of life by that covenant [of creation], the Lord was pleased to make a second,(1) commonly called the Covenant of Grace, whereby He freely offereth unto sinners life and salvation by Jesus Christ, requiring of them faith in Him, that they may be saved;(2) and promising to give unto all those that are ordained unto eternal life His Holy Spirit, to make them willing, and able to believe.(3)
(1) Gal. 3:21; Rom. 8:3; Rom. 3:20,21; Gen. 3:15; Isa. 42:6.
(2) Mark 16:15,16; John 3:16; Rom. 10:6,9; Gal. 3:11.
(3) Ezek. 36:26,27; John 6:44,45.
You will notice that the offer of salvation is made by God (through his preachers). The genuineness of the offer cannot be denied by saying that it's the preachers' offer, and they don't know who the elect are, and therefore they have to preach to everyone. That's not the Confession's point, and that's not God's point!
No matter how predestination and gospel preaching may seem to conflict in our rationality, we have to accept the Scripture presentation of both sides of this issue.
Both are simply true.
reviewed and retained.
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